What is Chatbot : Design Process & Its Architecture

The first Chabot called “ELIZA” was developed in 1960 by MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum (8th Jan 1923 in Germany – 5th March 2008). This is a type of computer program and the meaning of the word is “My God is Abundance”. The standard form of Eliza is “Enzyme-Linked Immune Sorbent Assay”. Some of those are Charlie, Cleverbot, Fred, Jenney AI, SimSimi, etc. Some of the Chatbot developed companies are Hedgehog Log founded in 2007, Dog Town Media in 2011, MobiDev established in 2009, Fusion Informatic founded in 2000, On graph Technologies in 2007, Optisol Business Solutions in 2006.

What is Chatbot?

It is a type of software used to interact with humans in different languages through different mobile apps, websites, messages, etc. The standard form of the bot is “Build-Operate-Transfer”. Chabot’s are not good for all-purpose chatting, because we have both advantages and disadvantages of using these. There are different names for that they are Smart bot, Conversational bot, Chatterbot, Talbot, Interactive agent, Conversational AI, and Conversational interface. Most of these are kind of a message interface, instead of human answering bots will give reply to the customer queries. Some factors which motivate the people to use Chatbots are productivity, entertainment, social and relational factors, and curiosity. Some of the good bot’s are Crawler’s, Transactional bots, Informational bots, Entertainment bots, art bots, game bots, etc and bad bots are hackers, spammers, scrapers, impersonators, etc.

How Chatbot Works?

It is a tool which is used for communication between human and robot via online messenger and they have CUI (Conversational User Interface ), which is used to enable humans to interact with machines in different languages, which is understandable by Chatbot. Those can be mostly found on platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, Instagram, Hike, website, etc.

They also have a brain, which has three main parts are Knowledge source, stock phrases, and conversation memory. When we say something to that, first it analyzes the word and looks for the keyword to give a reply to the users. It analyses the keyword using the three main parts of the brain and gives a reply to the user’s queries. This is the way the brain of the Chatbot works.

AI Chatbots

The standard form of AI  is Artificial Intelligence, it is used to chat with users in their natural languages through mobile apps, websites and many other messaging applications. Some of the examples are Spotify bot which is used to search for music easily, Wholefoods which is used to search for recipes, etc.

Types of Chatbots

There are two types those are AI and Fixed. The difference between AI and Fixed  are shown in the below table

Chatbot Design Process

There are seven steps to design the Chatbot process they are scope and requirement, identifying the inputs, understanding the UI elements, craft first interaction, build conversation and finally testing. The Chatbot design process figure is shown in the below

The first step to designing the Chatbot is to know the scope and requirements like why chatbot, platform to launch chatbots and its limitations. The second step is to identify the inputs from users in the form of queries through text, voice or images, from devices, and intelligence systems. The third step is to understand the User Interface (UI) elements, that we can see in our applications. UI elements are of five types they are: Command Line(CL), Graphical User Interface(GUI), Menu-Driven Interface (MDI), Form-Based Interface (FBI) and Natural Language Interface (NLI). After understanding user interface elements, the next step is to craft the first interaction and build a conversation. The final step of the Chatbot design process is testing, which is done on mobile and websites to know how it’s working.

Chatbot Architecture

An architecture of Chatbot requires a candidate response generator and response selector to give the response to the user’s queries through text, images, and voice. The architecture of the Chatbot is shown in the below figure.

In the above figure, user messages are given to an intent classification and entity recognition.

• Intent: An intent in the above figure is defined as a user’s intention, example the intent of the word “Good Bye” is to end the conversation similarly, the intent of the word “What are some good Chinese restaurants”  the intent would be to find a restaurant.
• Entity: An entity in the Chatbot is used to modifies an intent and there are three types of entities they are system entity, developer entity and session entity.
• Candidate Response Generator: The candidate response generator in the Chatbot do the calculations using different algorithms to process the user request. Then the result of these calculations is the candidate’s response.
• Response Selector: The response selector in the Chatbot used to select the word or text according to the user queries to give a response to the users which should work better.

Chatbot Challenges

Some of the challenges are

•   Security
•  Understanding user sentiments and emotions in case of voice bots
•  Language specialization
•  Nonstandard languages

Advantages

The advantages are

•  Less cost
•  24/7 Availability
• Learning and updating
•  It manages multiple clients
•  It is easy to use
•  Human effort is less

Disadvantages

Some of the disadvantages are

•  It takes more time for installing the app
•  Complex interface

Applications

The applications of Chatterbot are shown in the below

• Chatbot’s for entertainment: Jokebot, Quotebot, Dinner ideas bot, Ruuh, Zo, Genius, etc
• Chatbot’s for health: Webot, Meditatebot, Health tap, etc
• Chatbot’s for news and weather: CNN, Poncho, etc

The Chabot improves customer services, because of this improvement the benefits of the Chatbot are increasing day by day. In today’s world messaging has become one of the popular means of communication, whether it is a text message or through messaging apps. The Chabot’s are used in different fields for different purposes, because of these different types of businesses are being developed Chabot’s. The Chatbots are designed and developed based on customer queries and their languages. Here is a question for you, is it possible to create own without any coding knowledge?